11 Months.. Woah!

I do promise to try not to write a book about my adorable, smart, sometimes frustrating, hilarious, sometimes exhausting, beautiful now 11 month old in this post! We'll see....

Kylie is 11 months old and it is incredibly hard to believe. I'm actually starting to say in response to how old she is, "Almost one!" I've been trying to copy videos from our video camera to play at her birthday party and I watched the first few from the hospital and just started crying. She was so tiny compared to now and completely dependent on us. That is not so much the case now; she is little miss independent a lot of the time.

Our little photo shoots are getting more and more difficult for Mommy!! Still got some cute ones though.

This month, she has become a master at most of the things she started doing last month. There haven't been as many changes in milestones this month as there were in the prevous month, but she still is growing like crazy! Here are a few things that I can think of right now....

• She is talking a lot more now. There is rarely a time that she is not speaking something in her interesting foreign baby language. She makes some really wierd growling/grunting noises at us when she's excited to see us. She fake coughs, laughs on purpose to get us to laugh, and squeals high pictched whenever she feels like it (which is almost all of the time, lol). We love talking and laughing back and forth with her.
• She tells us what she wants. She will point to exactly what she wants, expecially when it's time to eat. It was starting to get frustrating when we couldn't figure out what she wanted to eat. We were just giving her what WE wanted to give her and she would or wouldn't eat it. Then she discovered pointing. Now while we're eating she will point to something else, like water, take a sip and continue with what she was eating. Or she'll point to some other kind of food, take a bite or so, and go back to what she was eating. It's pretty cute and really neat that she's able to communicate with us more now. The same goes for what she wants to play with or that she wants to go outside.
• She loves going outside, especially now that she knows what that big blue bathtub of water in the backyard is for! Haha!

• She is drinking LOTS of milk now out of her sippy cups. We've started mixing in a little bit of whole milk with her formula to get her tummy used to it. Hopefully after her birthday she'll be able to just drink regular milk with no tummy issues and no Kylie refusing issues. ;) So glad that she took to the sippy cups, since she refused to take bottles for so long.
• When she is determined to get somewhere and get there fast, she puts her head down while she crawls like it helps with aerodynamics or something. So funny. She will practice walking with her walker and furniture, but still is not that interested in doing it on her own. Apparently I was the same way, so we may have a late walker. She loves crawling so much, it wouldn't surprise me!
• She is eating big people food up a storm! All of a sudden she is obsessed with adult food and feeding herself this food. LOVES meat; shredded chicken, deli meat, etc. We've been buying the Dole canned fruits (in water or 100% juice). They are diced to just the right size for her.  She is getting better at handling mixed veggies. For some reason corn and peas were difficult. I think maybe because they are so small and hard to find in her mouth, so we still have to monitor her pretty closely with those. Especially since she's begun this 'let's stuff our face until the mouth is full and then let's choke' thing! We pretty much just put out a variety of foods on her tray and she goes to town. Sometimes the fruits are hard to pick up because they are wet, but she does a great job. Looking foward to not buying anymore canned baby foods! Or formula for that matter.
• She is gaining weight pretty well now. I think it has to do with more meat/protein in her diet. She is also drinking a sippy cup of milk every time she eats, snacks and meals. I am trying to get her more used to it since I will be hopefully weaning her by her birthday. She weighs somewhere around 18 1/2 ounds to 19 pounds. (Sad to say this, but I weighed this when I was 5 1/2 months, EEK!) She's about 29 or 30 inches tall. It's hard to measure wiggle worms! We'll get the official at her one year appt.
• Pacifier stays. Well, for naps and emergencies only. She's only really ever needed it for naps and we've given it to her in situations where she feels uncomfortable. Lately we haven't been giving it to her when we're out and about or in the car, so she doesn't really need it. We've decided that it stays for naps, at least until we or she decides otherwise. It's such a minimal part of the day, so it wouldn't interfere with her teeth/mouth development and she talks like crazy because she never has it in her mouth besides naptime. So there we go. :)

And it looks like this may be book length, so sorry, but there's just SO much to say about this little girl! Looking forward to sharing her first birthday with all of her family! Here's to 2 really good naps before everyone arrives and being in a great mood while crowds of family gather around her... Ha! :)

First swim.. this is where she preferred to be the entire time. :)

Mommy found a giraffe swimsuit! Had to test it out!

Enjoying the floaty the secone time around.